The increased use of microwaves for cooking has given rise to a large market in microwavable foods. While the advantage of microwave cooking over convection oven cooking is the time savings, the disadvantage heretofore has been that flavored goods do not develop the flavoring expected with convection oven cooking.
Heretofore, when using microwave ovens for cooking foodstuffs containing flavoring and browning additives or flavoring and browning formation additives, the food to be cooked taken in combination with additives therefor did not have the proper time-temperature-heat transfer variable (e.g., heat capacity, thermal conductivity, viscosity and density) combination for the added flavoring composition to effectively impart, augment or enhance flavor to the resulting product, e.g., chewing gum, beverage or foodstuff. Therefore, for a microwave system to work, the physical heat and mass transfer conditions must be such that the added flavor values must not be driven off or destroyed and must be properly imparted to the foodstuff, beverage or chewing gum.
The reaction responsible for chocolate flavor formation during convection oven cooking is the reaction between sugar, leucine and phenyl alanine which results in the creation of various reaction products including aldol condensation products such as COCAL.RTM. (a Registered Trademark of International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.) having the structure: ##STR1##
Although the prior art does take advantage of the reaction between reducing sugars and amino acids, it has not made any correlation of reaction rates needed for formation of a substantive strong chocolate flavor with reaction variables such as time, pH, solvent, amino acid reactivity or sugar reactivity.